Since its founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has known its fair share of bloody protests. Each time, the regime ultimately managed to quell them, often brutally.
The current unrest roiling Iran stands out – both for its apparent scale and for a confluence of factors absent in earlier rounds. If casualty figures reported by the London-based opposition outlet Iran International are even remotely accurate, the violence is extraordinary.
But beyond the bloodshed itself, this protest wave is unfolding against a backdrop fundamentally different from the past: an Iran weakened by the 12-Day War in June with Israel and, in its final days, the United States; an American president who has openly threatened intervention and demonstrated a willingness to act; and the active participation of the merchant class, long viewed as a conservative pillar of the Islamic Republic.
No one can honestly predict where this will end. But taken together, these factors increase the likelihood that this round of protests – more than those before it – represents an existential challenge to the ayatollahs’ rule.
First, the numbers. Iran International reported on Sunday that at least 2,000 people have been killed in protests over the last 48 hours.
If this number is true, and it is impossible to verify due to the regime’s media and Internet blackout, it constitutes a dramatic escalation compared with past protest waves.
During the 2009-2010 Green Movement protests over election fraud, estimates put the death toll between 70 and 110. Nationwide economic protests between 2012 and 2018 reportedly killed 40 to 50 people. The November 2019 fuel-price uprising was deadlier, Reuters estimated that some 1,500 people were killed. And during the 2022-2023 “Women, Life, Freedom” protests, between 450 and 550 people were killed.
If roughly 2,000 people have already died in just two weeks, the implication is stark. It signals a regime willing to use overwhelming force, but also one whose brutality risks fueling further rage and resistance.
When will the US president act?
The numbers matter for another reason: US President Donald Trump. On several occasions since the protest began, he warned that the US would intervene if Iran began “killing people, which they tend to do during their riots..”
Trump’s threat of intervention, reinforced by US strikes against Iran in June and the recent action against Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro, marks a sharp departure from past American responses.
Now, as the number of dead rises steeply, this raises the unavoidable question: When does the president act? That question is being asked with equal urgency in Washington and Tehran - and the uncertainty alone may already be shaping Iran's calculations.
This posture contrasts sharply with that of president Barack Obama during the 2009-2010 protests, when Washington avoided explicit support for regime change or military intervention.
Even during the protest waves that took place during Trump’s first term and under president Joe Biden, the US responses focused on condemnations, sanctions, and cyber measures – not on direct military threats tied to internal repression.
This, then, is the first major protest wave in which the Iranian leadership faces an explicit US warning of military intervention if there is massive bloodshed.
That reality shapes both the calculations of Iran’s leaders and the psychology on the street. For protesters, the sense that they are not alone – and that outside intervention could constrain the regime – provides a tailwind that did not exist before.
The timing matters as well. The Islamic Republic is weaker today than at any point since 1979, and that weakness is widely perceived by adversaries, allies, and Iranians themselves.
Thanks to the beating it took at the hands of Israel and the US in June, the regime is no longer seen – in the world, the region, or among its own people – as an unstoppable juggernaut, aided by a host of proxies that project Iran’s will throughout the Mideast and even the world. The war revealed Iran as a paper tiger, and this has significance not only worldwide but also within Iran itself.
Israel’s strikes killed senior IRGC and military leaders, including IRGC commander Hossein Salami and chief of staff Mohammad Bagheri, who oversaw the brutal 2019 crackdown on protesters. Other senior Quds Force figures were also eliminated.
This was more than symbolic. It amounted to a decapitation of the command layer responsible for both internal repression and external power projection.
Salami and Bagheri were members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, as were two other senior generals killed in the war. Their deaths removed experienced decision-makers from the body that determines when and how security forces are deployed against domestic unrest.
Successors have been named, but it takes time to build up trust, authority, and coordination – especially in a system already rife with suspicion.
Psychological blows to the regime's confidence
Beyond the blow to Iran’s nuclear infrastructure and ballistic missile capacity, June’s war also inflicted a psychological blow. Despite official propaganda, it was a public humiliation. According to a Telegraph report last year, it triggered paranoia, purges, and internal distrust within the IRGC amid fears of extensive Israeli infiltration. A security force that does not trust its own ranks is less reliable when ordered to confront mass protests – particularly when demonstrators include respected merchants and workers, not just students.
Compounding the problem, Tehran is now diverting resources to rebuild missile production and air defense systems damaged in the war. Funds that might normally go toward internal security – Basij salaries, riot-control equipment, surveillance technologies – are being redirected elsewhere. Every rial spent on military reconstruction is one not spent on suppressing unrest.
The result: The regime is facing its most serious protest wave in years with a weaker, more distracted, and more paranoid security apparatus.
There is another factor as well – one that strikes at the heart of the regime’s long-standing narrative. For years, Tehran justified spending hundreds of billions of dollars on regional proxies as a defensive necessity. These forces, Iranians were told, would come to the country’s aid in a moment of crisis.
They didn’t. By June, Syria had effectively collapsed. Hamas had been militarily decapitated. And despite possessing tens of thousands of rockets, Hezbollah stayed on the sidelines. The Houthis launched only token attacks. For many Iranians, the conclusion was unavoidable: Vast national resources had been squandered for an illusion of protection that failed when it mattered most.
This grievous misuse of funds has become one of the rallying cries behind the protests, which started two weeks ago after the rial plunged and shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar shut their stores and walked out, protesting the currency collapse and dizzying inflation
Within days, the economic nature of the protests – runaway prices and systemic corruption – gave way to explicitly political chants such as “Death to the dictator.”
The sequencing here is important – and different from previous rounds. This is not students and reformists pulling the bazaar behind them, but the bazaar triggering the wave and drawing students, workers, and others in its wake.
For decades after 1979, the alliance between the clerics and the bazaar formed a cornerstone of the Islamic Republic. Its leader, Ali Khamenei, had repeatedly praised bazaar merchants as among the regime’s most faithful supporters, confident they could never be mobilized against the state. There were flashes of discontent during currency protests in 2021 and price hikes in the late 2010s, but nothing approaching today’s scale.
This time is different. Merchants with real economic leverage and deep social capital – especially in Tehran – are visibly in the front ranks. Their involvement changes the social composition of the protests and sharply raises the stakes for the regime.
What makes this particular moment feel different than any previous waves of protests is not any single factor but the convergence of all of them at once: a regime exposed militarily and psychologically, a security apparatus distracted and distrustful, an economy in free fall, a merchant class no longer on the sidelines, and a US president openly warning that mass bloodshed will carry consequences.
Any one of these on its own might not be enough. Together, however, they create a degree of pressure that the Islamic Republic has not faced before. Whether this proves fatal remains uncertain. But for the first time in years, the regime is not just suppressing protests, it is doing so from a position of unmistakable weakness.